Forum Stats and Feedback

The Star Wars Galaxies forum is home to one of our most active forum communities. Community Members can be found chatting about their characters, professions, gameplay tactics, ideas and feedback, or just shooting the breeze, hanging with friends. Here's a breakdown on some of the posting trends of our community.

The groups (ranks) on the forums are mainly separated into earned and general categories. Earned forum groups are forum members who have active subscriptions. The general forum group is made up of people who are not registered as active at the moment this includes community members on trial accounts, people who pay month-to-month and may be in-between their billing cycle, and people who miss the game so much they stick around to "chat" with the die hard fans!

Once a community member is registered as active, they will advance through the earned groups. Each group has a different set of permissions. As community members advance, they earn new permissions and new forum display titles, but will continue to keep the permissions they earned from previousgroups. Even when someone earns a special forum title, they will continue to be part of the earned groups.

This chart shows a breakdown of posts that have been made by the various earned groups and the general group from February 8, 2007 to July 29, 2010.

This chart shows a breakdown of the number of posts that were created on the different profession forums as of July 29, 2010.

This chart shows a breakdown of the number of posts that were created on several different sections of the forums as of July 29, 2010. Click to the larger image to see the list of the sections included in this chart.

To shed some light on the question of whether or not we read your posts, here's an article I wrote last year about your feedback!

Thank You For Your Feedback

Contrary to the popular opinion, your feedback doesn't really end up in a proverbial black hole. We really are listening! So to break rumors about this ancient myth, I wanted to share with everyone how we actually use your feedback.

The SOE Community Relations team monitors the official game forums, external forums, blogs, and other public methods of communication. We collect your new ideas and feedback and categorize them based on the subjects. While doing this, we pull out the best messages to use for quotes and share links for further details.

Once we have information collected, we place them into various reports we file each day, week, month, etc.

• Daily Reports Each day we submit several daily reports to our community team and to the development teams. These daily reports include hot topics for that day.

• Weekly Reports Each week we submit an overall weekly report to the community team, producers, marketing, public relations and others associated directly with our games. These reports include a list of the hottest topics in the community for that week.

• Monthly Reports Each month we put together reports of the current state of the games. We generally use what's included in the weekly reports but we also use additional feedback from the community.

• Specific Reports We often create reports about specific subjects - new releases, new features associated with the games, or out of the ordinary topics. These reports only include feedback directly related to those subjects.

• Random Reports Even outside the reports that we submit, whenever we spot an idea or feedback that we feel needs further explanation, we'll send a report to the development teams before we comment about them on the forums. The development teams will either give us the answers we need for posting or the devs will respond to the threads themselves.

• Player Post Highlights For each of our games, we highlight interesting posts made on the official forums. These highlights can be seen on the main news page for the games. You will see these spotlights in the form of a Forum Hodgepodge, Treasure Chest, Weekly Picks or similarly named feature. We may even turn those posts into separate features. In some cases we also have them highlighted on the forums.

While we may not get a chance to read every message made about our games between the Community Relations team, Game Development teams and other departments that visit the forums, blogs, and fansites, we see as much feedback as possible each day.

We also talk about your feedback at daily, weekly, and monthly meetings for our games.

"That's really cool, but how can I make sure my feedback gets seen?"

If you want to make sure your feedback gets seen and used, just BE COOL! Yes, I really made up an acronym for it!

• Be Basic You may know what you mean but others may have no idea what you are talking about. Keep your message basic. Explain the intent of your message. The first paragraph should be a basic explanation or overview of the purpose or problem. You can provide details afterwards. If you have solutions for a problem, you can add that after the details. Keep "be basic" in mind when thinking about a subject for your message too; avoid making it vague.

• Be Eloquent Run your message through a spellchecker and/or grammar checker before posting it. It's really hard for us to take quotes from messages that are in all caps, have no punctuation, in all lower-case, or contain other grammatical or formatting errors. While we don't expect everyone to pass writing classes before posting messages, we do find it easier to collect the feedback when the messages are well written.

• Be Constructive Whether your feedback is positive or negative, we expect it to be Constructive. There's a big difference between constructive and destructive feedback.

  • Constructive feedback is that which is appropriate for the forums, and within the Community Policies and Terms of Service. While these messages aren't required to agree with a given topic or other posters, they are required to be helpful, respectful and not to break any of our guidelines.

  • Destructive feedback serves no purpose other than to launch personal attacks, engage in arguments and make the forums uncomfortable for others. In addition, reposting your message without rewording it to be within the guidelines above may result in administrative action against your account. Destructive posts are not considered appropriate and will usually either be removed, locked, or warrant further administrative actions.

• Be Original Before starting your own thread on a subject, check other posts to make sure someone else didn't start discussing it first. If we see multiple threads on the same subject, we're more than likely only to concentrate on the first one posted and instruct moderators to move related posts to that thread.

• Be On Topic Make sure your feedback is related to the game or SOE.

• Be Logical While a flying Jedi gnome with wings and robotic wheels for feet as a new player race might sound like a fun idea, it probably wouldn't be very feasible to add to any of our games. When sharing ideas or feedback, think about the gameplay systems and whether or not the suggestions is appropriate to the game. The development teams are constantly adding new features and gameplay systems but there are limitations.

So remember, when you post about games, if you want your feedback heard, just BE COOL about it! That is all for now and thank you for your feedback!

Zatozia the Torturess
Community Relations Manager